“Blasting off on a desperate mission to save Earth from the evil plottings of the tyrannical space lord Ming the Merciless, Dr. Hans Zarkov and Dale Arden have joined me, Flash Gordon, on a fantastic journey into worlds where peril and adventure await us.”

A lot of people have recently been doing nostalgic looks back at American animation through the ages or just at the cartoons and kids shows of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Annoyingly, while hitting a lot of the better-known highlights, everyone seems to give either little or no mention to what was, for me, one of the truly great science fiction Saturday morning cartoons. The Adventures of Flash Gordon, at least the first season, should be more widely recognized as a true classic. Yet, other than a few childhood friends and my childhood-in-spirit friend Sean Scullion, I meet very few people who seem remember it. That really needs to change, as the show’s first season stands up amazingly well all these years after it first aired.

Kevin Smith gets a lot of grief for his films lately. Here’s why I like that he’s still doing his thing his way.

Kevin Smith has been making films “professionally” since 1994’s Clerks. A series of films following Clerks made him a huge, buzzworthy name in cinema in the 1990s. Odds were good that there was at least one huge fan of Kevin Smith in almost every group of friends, and more than a few people around you were quoting Jay’s lines from any number of Jay & Silent Bob scenes. A lot of people were getting behind Kevin Smith’s success as a filmmaker. It was a great story of the little guy making good in the profession he loved. After all, this was a guy who somehow made it big with on a film that he made on only (originally) $27,000 and was almost entirely 92 minutes of just people talking to each other.

In Spring of 1982, Marc Singer was still about six months away from becoming an icon to genre fans by starring in The Beastmaster and about a year away from cementing that status by fighting the evil, lizard-faced alien invaders of television’s science fiction epic miniseries V. I became a fan of Marc Singer because of an entirely different (and different kind) of role. Despite my lifelong status as typically being one of the bigger geeks in whatever company I was keeping, I discovered Marc Singer around this time as an actor in a non-genre film that is still to this day my favorite of his many roles.

It goes by many names. It has been called Der Supercop, El Super Policia Nuclear, Super Snooper, Super Batsos, and a host of other names across the globe. But if you were living in America in the boom period of early 1980s cable television, you know it as simultaneously one of the worst and one of the best superhero films ever made, and you knew it as Super Fuzz! It is a film that must be tracked down and watched by everyone ASAP. Or, you know, just whenever you can track it down.

The newest iteration of the Mummy has come to the big screen, and all signs point to it leaving the big screen in fairly short order. I don’t write that with any sense of joy. I’m a horror guy. I like horror, and I actually like the Mummy as an iconic horror monster. I’d love to see more of the attempts at modern horror using the classic monsters succeed. I’d love to see a shared universe where the Universal Studios classic monsters all walk the same Earth. Unfortunately, it sometimes seems that we either won’t be getting that or that we’ll get it and it won’t be worth the time to watch it.